I do not write to champion a group of people. I come to tell their story with conviction and truth. But you need permission from the person with ownership of the story, and their version of events may clash with what really happened.

You cannot run a modern sophisticated economy the way you run a tuck shop at Eton. This country needs money spent to get our young back into work and training. There was enormous debt when I grew up – we'd been through a war. Unemployment was at a high when I started writing for Brookside [in 1982]. But we threw money at the problem.

There's a wonderful Antony Gormley sculpture,The Iron Men, on Crosby Beach in Liverpool. It looks out to sea and says a lot about coastal cities, how we went out on to ships and brought our influences back in. I know working-class men who left school at 15 who are steeped in international politics.

I was about eight or nine before I gained the ability to speak. I made what I thought were very intelligible sounds, but people couldn't distinguish anything. Slowly I grew out of it, but then came the stammer. And I tell you, I would sooner have gone through my life unable to speak.

My childhood was nothing extraordinary. We were no poorer than anyone else in our street and it was an area of typically large Irish Catholic families [McGovern is one of nine]. There were five masses every Sunday and it was still not enough for everybody.

It's easy to have integrity when you have money. When you're skint and you've got a wife and three kids to feed [he was a father of three at 23], you will do things you're not that proud of and that you would never tell anybody.

I am less an overtly political dramatist now than I have ever been. Brookside was a fantastic time because we fought so hard for the storylines we believed in, but I see now I was wrong to write that way. Jim Allen can do it, but he's a genius.

I knew Kenny Dalglish was a gifted footballer, but somewhere he has found the most amazing qualities of leadership, and for that I love him.

In his regard for the niceties and intricacies of British law, Jack Straw found himself unable initially to release Michael Shields [the Liverpool FC supporter who was jailed for the attempted murder of a Bulgarian fan]. It was the same Jack Straw who did little to help the Hillsborough families in their campaign for justice. And it was the same Jack Straw who said: "You know Scousers – always up to something." If you substitute the phrase "my Asian constituents" for "Scousers", the enormity of what Jack Straw said would be apparent.

There's nothing that aids writing like movement. I spend most of my time pacing around, thinking the words, because that's when the best ideas come. There'll be a moment when it clicks, and then other moments when I lose that energy and find myself looking at my feet, trying to get back in.

The second series of Jimmy McGovern's The Accused starts on BBC1 on 14 August